Tuesday, November 5th – Friday, November 8th, 2024
World Tour Days 3-6
We arrived to Nairobi at 7:35am on the 5th, after our 5.5 hour flight from Doha, Qatar. Luckily for us our hotel has pickup service from the airport which made arrival to our hotel a breeze. This was great since our travel to get here started on Sunday. We spent the first day just relaxing, organizing our belongings, and fighting the urge to go to bed too early. Our hotel was surrounded by lots of small markets, and in the distance skyscrapers.
There were only a few things on our list to do in this city before joining our overland tour group: get the last supplies we needed such as laundry detergent, get a haircut for Nick, visit the Giraffe Center, visit the Nairobi National Park, and reunite with my one of my best friends and her husband. They are joining us on the overland tour for 2 months. If you get your haircut in Nairobi be prepared for it to be a 1.5 hour endeavor, they are very thorough. All the food in Nairobi is delicious and relatively affordable. The portion sizes are so large that Nick and I could easily share one plate for every meal. We tried lots of fruits, stewed meats, curries, and more. One particularly amusing meal experience was when we went to the restaurant ‘Carnivore’. It is an all you can eat meat buffet where they bring you the meats one by one served with sauces and salads. The meat included fish, ostrich kebab, ostrich meatballs, bull testicles, chicken, beef ribs, pork ribs, lamb ribs, and beef kebab. It was more than our other meals but was worth it for the experience.
The Giraffe Center was about 45 minutes south of our hotel, but the drive was worth it. You arrive and receive a bowl of food each, and walk along a raised walkway where giraffes from the center can choose to come up to be fed by you. It was incredible, they take one pellet at a time from your hand with their long tongues and are so gentle. They had several babies and adults. We were happy to have arrived around opening time because once we had been there for 20 minutes all the tour groups started to come and it became more difficult to participate.
On another day we visited Nairobi National Park, 30 minutes south of our hotel, where we did two activities. The first was to visit the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s Elephant Nursery. The elephant nursery had 22 baby elephants and 2 rhinos when we went. They take care of orphaned elephants until they are about 3 years old and then reintroduce them into a wild herd over several years. We got to watch the elephants get fed their 11:00am bottles of milk for an hour and play in the mud. They splashed dirt, rolled around, and played with each other. We learned about how they are taken care of and how each elephant was found and why they were an orphan. It was both educational and adorable.
After the elephants we got on a safari truck and did a 3 hour tour of the park. We saw every animal you could wish to see, then others you wouldn’t even think you would. There were several groups of giraffes, including one with a baby that was no older than one week according to our guide since its umbilical cord was still attached. There were antelope, gazelles, zebra, ostriches, crocodiles, hippos, herons, and baboons. There was a baby baboon that was stuck in a fence, we luckily spotted him and were able to contact rangers to help free him. We saw several groups of lions, some far away, some very close to the truck, and one licking a cub. There were also several groups of white and black rhinos, including 2 babies, and at least 10 adults.
Then it was time to get ready for our 57 day overland tour of Africa.
